Exclusive Preview: King of the Flies: The Origin of the World

The first volume of European comics creators Mezzo and Pirus’ King of the Flies, subtitled Hallorave, was one of the creepiest graphic novels of 2010–an intersecting set of short pieces about a small group of people drawn together by sex, drugs and violence in various combinations, whose horror deepens with every new connection it draws between its characters and incidents. The follow-up, The Origin of the World, comes out soon, and it makes the story’s vortex of terror spin even faster–the vibe is somewhere between Charles Burns’ Black Hole and Blue Velvet, with a soundtrack of Misfits singles, Stones bootlegs and too-intense techno. Courtesy of Fantagraphics, we’ve got an exclusive preview of one of the book’s vignettes–apparently the only episode that doesn’t include images tender eyes shouldn’t see. (Yes, that’s “The Origin of the World” in the Gustave Courbet sense.)